Accessible Web Sites

Accessibility to most people means accommodating people with disabilities, using curb cuts, closed captioning, or Braille. On the Web, think of accessibility as a way to maximize your audience.

When I design a Web site, I use all of the standard accessibility features of HTML, like "alt" text in <img> tags and text menus that are usable by screen readers. There's more to accessibility than that, though. You're putting your information on the Web because you want people to read it. If you have a business, you want to sell your products or services, and every person that can't access your Web pages is a person that can't do business with you. Here are some of the other issues I consider part of accessibility:

Reasonable Fonts In Graphics

Sometimes, graphical buttons can add a lot to a site. If the designer uses a tiny typeface, though, then people with high-resolution screens can have difficulty reading them. I have pretty good eyesight, but after a long day of staring at the computer, I find some sites hard to navigate.
 

Scalable Text in Menus

Web designers have been using text for menus for years. Text menus load faster than graphics, and users can enlarge them easily. Unfortunately, many designers build sites where enlarging the text destroys the site layout. You can "lock down" text sizes with style sheets, but newer browsers (like Netscape 6 and other Gecko-based browsers) can override that. Users with special needs gravitate toward browsers that meet those needs.
 

Careful Color Selection

Colorblindness is real, and affects a significant percentage of the population (almost all men). You should never put, for example, green text on a red background of roughly equivalent intensity (green/red colorblindness is the most common), or yellow on blue. Just like the tests you get at the optomotrist, the text would be invisible to colorblind people.
 

Partial Color Selection

Most Web browsers let you set a default background color and text color that you like. If a Web site doesn't specify something different, the Web browser follows your preferences. Set your preferences the way you like, and sometimes you'll encounter a page that just doesn't work. This can happen when a site designer specifies a text color (blue, perhaps) without specifying a background color. Most people use white or gray backgrounds, so that usually works fine. What happens, though, when someone sets their browser to use white text on a blue background? They visit that site and see a solid field of blue--blue text on a blue background. This is a sure sign of an amateur Web designer.